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Tuesday, May 22, 2007 |
Guardian: "When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.
Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.
It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.
Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Queen Mary, University of London, has just come back from a month spent in Iraq, largely in the Green Zone. He thinks the Americans are unlikely to pull out of Iraq fully until the end of the next presidency at the earliest, and so the new embassy will serve its purpose for several years to come.
'A fortress-style embassy, with a huge staff, will remain in Baghdad until helicopters come to airlift the last man and woman from the roof,' he said, adding his own advice to the architects of the building: 'Include a large roof.'"
The 'Embassy' looks like a prison; maybe they have a special building for torture only.
10:51:32 AM 
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BBC: "A senior police officer has said he fears the spread of CCTV cameras is leading to an Orwellian situation."
Guardian: "The UK's first police 'spy drone' has taken to the skies.
The remote control helicopter, fitted with CCTV cameras, will be used by officers in Merseyside to track criminals and record anti-social behaviour."
Slashdot: "In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business. Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"
PrivacyDigest: "Tiny cameras the size of a fingernail linked to specialist computers are to be used to monitor the behaviour of airline passengers as part of the war on terrorism.
Cameras fitted to seat-backs will record every twitch, blink, facial expression or suspicious movement before sending the data to onboard software which will check it against individual passenger profiles."
Of course, monitoring all those images is an impossible task. So their use for preventing violence is very limited. If computers are used to evaluate all information many mistakes will slip in and make travel very insecure. The chance of being the victim of terrorism is much smaller than the chance of being harassed by police nowadays. In certain districts of Amsterdam police have the right to search any person they consider suspicious.
And as the individual honest citizen is increasingly subjected to surveillance, those in power are ever more ducking their democratic responsibilities, resorting to criminal activities and breaking national and international laws. Some of our leaders can simply be called war criminals. They are not checked at all.
10:42:43 AM
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